Who Should I be Surveying

When you do a survey for customer satisfaction, should you have a target market? Should you aim your survey at everyone, or is that too inefficient? If you narrow your survey down to specific groups of customers, how do you know whether you’re targeting the right ones?

The best way to look at these questions is to start with the Pareto Principle, which says that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. What does this mean for your bottom line? In sales, it means that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your customers. They’re the ones who make the largest purchases, who keep coming back, and who have a feeling of loyalty toward your business If you keep that 20% happy, you’ve taken care of 80% of your business, right there.

These are the people who you can turn into ideal clients – the ones who aren’t just customers, but fans of your business. They’re the ones who not only use your products or services, but love them, and are happy to tell their friends and colleagues about how great those products and services are. They’re the ones who spend more, and complain less.

When you identify your top 20%, you can focus your surveys on them, and use the results to respond quickly to their needs, to build solid relationships with them, and to make them a priority when implementing value added services.

How can we confidently make a commitment to our customers that we will respond to the concerns that we uncover as the result of a customer satisfaction survey?

Nobody likes to make promises that they can’t keep, and in business, it’s a sure way to lose customers. So how can you make and keep the promises that you need to make to your customers? In particular, how can you commit yourself to meeting the needs of that top 20%?

The best way to successfully make a commitment and to follow through with it is by means of two basic principles: make it easy, and make it unavoidable.

The ASK-LISTEN-RETAIN system automates the process of uncovering and responding to customer concerns. ALR analyzes survey results, detects problems and areas of concern, and notifies the appropriate manager – who must them view the record of the problem and contact the customer in order to resolve the problem within a set period of time. This automation eliminates the effort required to analyze the data, determine when there’s a problem, identify the manager who should address the problem, and prompt that manager to act. ALR takes care of all of that for you.

And since the ASK-LISTEN-RETAIN system monitors the way that the responsible manager handles the problem, notifying higher-level managers if there’s a delay in the response, it makes it virtually impossible to avoid the task of responding to customer concerns. Store-level managers are automatically held accountable for response to and resolution of the problems uncovered in customer satisfaction surveys.

With automated survey analysis, response management, and accountability, the ALR system takes care of the footwork of making and keeping commitments, leaving you free to concentrate on building lasting relationships with your customers.

If you would like to know more about how the ASKLISTENRETAIN System or how it can help create customer retention and loyalty, please contact us.